


Copper Threads

by SpaceWall



Series: The Iron King [1]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Father-Son Relationship, First Age, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mild Gore, Miracles, Psychological Trauma, Really it’s not as bad as these tags sound, Rebirth, Suicide, Temporary Character Death, Thangorodrim, it’s just, y'know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:33:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21829015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWall/pseuds/SpaceWall
Summary: Maitimo escapes from Thangorodrim, the only way he knows how. Fëanáro is not letting his eldest son die in such a way. Námo always has been soft to pleas from a place of love.
Relationships: Fëanor | Curufinwë & Maedhros | Maitimo, Fëanor | Curufinwë & Námo | Mandos
Series: The Iron King [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1669603
Comments: 93
Kudos: 194





	Copper Threads

**Author's Note:**

> CW/TW: Suicide! Descriptions of dead bodies! Everyone is traumatized because Beleriand! This has dark subtext and text throughout, even though everything works out for now.
> 
> On names: This is pre-Ban, so everyone is using Quenya names. As a quick refresher, that’s Maitimo-Maedhros, Fëanáro-Fëanor, Makalaurë-Maglor, Findekáno-Fingon and Tyelkormo-Celegorm.

He saw his chance as the orc that was holding him up began to twist the metal rod through the bones of his arm. It was Morgoth’s choice to do this slowly, sadistically, that gave him his chance. Maitimo forced his starved, broken body to ripple, making the orc readjust his angle. In that second of changing position, he made his numb fingers close, drove them into the orc’s eyes, and that was that. 

He wouldn’t have won the fight, but he wasn’t trying to win. The second he was unheld, all he had to do was stagger a half-step forward and fall. The whole thing was over in a matter of moments, and then the body of Maedhros, Son of Fëanor, never named as such, lay still at the roots of the mountain.

For a man, it would have ended there. Nienna would have scooped him up and taken him beyond the perceptions of even her brother. But Maitimo was no man. Instead, his sprit flew towards the halls of Námo under its own power. 

It was not the streak of fire that Fëanáro’s had been, but Maitimo’s death was still visible, to those below. Where his father had been a huge meteor, rocketing towards its destination with fire and destruction, Maitimo was but a little shooting star. The light was white, and, if not for the prescience of elves, might have been missed entirely. Yet as it was, Makalaurë, High King of the Noldor in Beleriand, looked up and witnessed it. Prince Findekáno, in the darkness and the cold, fell to his knees and wept. Nerdanel the Wise, alone with her sculptures, watched and knew that wisdom was nothing at all. Míriel, hands steady, selected white and copper threads, knowing what the next deed of her son’s house she wove would be.

Fëanáro, deep below the earth, closed his eyes and waited. He was not so long dead, and for all this time, he had been alone. His father had not been far away, but Fëanáro had not wished to see him. He had not wished to see anybody. His failure ate at him. 

It took only a second for Nienna to come to him. Her porcelain face was streaked down with tears, as it always was. There were cracks in the surface of her, as if the firing had gone badly. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning pity not remorse. 

Fëanáro nodded to her. Then, for the first time since he had been imprisoned in this obsidian cell, he stood. 

“Take me to my son,” he commanded. Living, words of power would have filled the room, twisting tone and intent into being. 

He was dead, and Nienna would not have obeyed him even with the untamed power he had held in life. Instead, she reached out, hands gloved with black lace, and wiped away a tear he did not know he was shedding. 

“Weep,” she said, “it would do you good.”

Perhaps he had not been weeping before she came to him. Again, he said, “take me to my son.” The outcome mattered more than his pride. “Please.”

“Even now, he comes to you.” Nienna passed a judgement of her own. “Your flight has killed him, yet he still yearns for you. You are much-blessed in the quality of your children.”

Fëanáro agreed. “Yes, I am.” It was the first time he had agreed with an Ainu in years, although without the trees, the passage of time could hardly be counted as he knew it. 

She waited with him, silent and still as the child’s dolls she so closely resembled. It was only when Maitimo, form dripping with blood, caked with dirt, stumbled into being, that she moved. As one, she and Fëanáro took hold of him. They wiped away his tears and as he shook, Fëanáro held the child’s fëa against his own. With damp cloths called from nothing, Nienna and Fëanáro wiped away the stains of life on the immortal soul. All the time, Maitimo spoke not a word. His copper hair hung heavy around his shoulders, missing entirely in chunks. His spirit did not remember what it was supposed to be. 

When all the blood and dirt was gone, he looked clearly at last upon his father, and fell into his arms. 

“Shh,” Fëanáro told him, “all will be well.” Already, he was scheming to make it so.

It was a year or two later when he finally talked his way into the presence of the Lord of the Dead. Fëanáro was no Lúthien, with Melian’s incomparable beauty, but as she was the Greatest of the Sindar, fairest and most powerful, he was of the Noldor. Great in his fashion as any Maia’s-daughter. 

“He deserves a second chance,” Fëanáro said, to the Judge of the Valar.

“No,” Námo decreed. Already, he had been lenient in allowing Fëanáro the company of his son. Most spirits, by Námo’s design, were solitary. 

Fëanáro did not back away. Instead, as his mother’s son, he drew on the threads that the world was woven from. What she did with the great deeds of the past, he did with the insignificant ones. A thousand small kindnesses from a boy who was, despite all his circumstances, fundamentally good. He wove them together by hand, twisting threads over each other until he held a rope so strong it could have bound a Vala. But he bound no one. Instead, he handed it to Námo freely. Let him witness, up close, the magnitude of all that had been and now could never be.

As he would have in another world, for a different kind of love that was no less great, Námo wept. Like his sister, the tears rolled silently down his cheeks, carving a path down eerily unmarked skin. Unlike her, he hid the fact in a raised hood. “It is no kindness you would have me offer him.”

Noble head bowed low, Fëanáro said, “No. It is a terrible thing I ask of you both. But he is needed yet.”

“You doom the son you love more than anything to terrible hardship.”

“He is marked for the darkness in the end,” Fëanáro said, and, “if I loved him more than anything, he would not be. Thus, it is evident I do not. You would be wrong to keep him here on my account.”

It was the first time in Námo’s many eternities that he was acutely aware of any being other than Melkor lying to his face. This was a novelty, and he said as much. 

“No lie,” the elf countered, “for you and I both know that it is true that any truly loving father would ever leave any child to such a cold fate.”

And Námo thought, as he so rarely did and yet never ceased to do, of his own father. Their shared Father. He who had brought Námo and Melkor and Fëanáro alike into this world, and would carry at least one of them out of it before this was done. 

Time for Námo, who was Doomsman and Seer, Husband to History and Brother to Imagination and Regret, existed as something both fundamental and insignificant. For him Maitimo was already Maedhros, and always and never had been. Even for he who laid doom upon the Noldor, all things were certain and in continual motion. Truths merged and separated, brushing up against each other and combining like bubbles in water before splitting apart like cells. Maedhros was one-handed, although he now had never been and would never be. The killer, he knew, of a city that was not yet founded, of children who might never be born.

Námo was never comforting, and told no lies. “You have not sealed his doom yet.”

Neither was Fëanáro, nor did he. “You have.”

It was true, and not. It might be. It had been, but that was Vairë’s province more than his own. And that doom had been laid upon an elf who was now dead, rotting corpse hanging from the walls of Angband for all to see. Námo was a seer and a Judge, but it would be wrong to say that he made the future. Eru was not so cruel as to make the song only malleable by Melkor. Aulë had change it. Yavanna had changed it. Every elf did so, day to day. Such was the nature of Arda, its most fundamental and intended design. Fate was what its inhabitants made it. 

“Not yet,” said Námo, who was Judge and Jury, but never Executioner. “Not yet.” He draped the long rope over his shoulders as if he was carrying a snake. As he stood, his grey robes pooled at his feet, and their hood fell back to reveal a face that was terrible in its beauty. “He will know, when it is time.”

Makalaurë, High King of the Noldor in Beleriand, watched the Eagle of Manwë descend with weary eyes. The red hair that hung from between its talons revealed the nature of its prize. 

“Beast,” Tyelkormo hissed, in the creature’s own tongue. It was silent, as it settled gently on the ground in the centre of their encampment. In Quenya, he said, “Could you not have come when he yet breathed?”

Makalaurë had no such pretenses at anger. At least this way, they could bury him. There would be no more of their continued shame. 

“Thank you,” he forced himself to say, to the bird, and again to the elf who slid carefully from its back. Dark skin streaked grey with dust, black hair limp and lifeless without his signature gold, Findekáno offered him a sad smile.

To Tyelkormo, he said, “I’m sorry. I would have if I could.”

Tyelkormo didn’t believe it, but Makalaurë did. Again, he said, “thank you.”

The eagle flapped his wings, setting Makalaurë and Tyelkormo’s hair flying behind them like flags. Then he launched away, leaving a single giant feather, scraped patches of earth, and an unmoving body. 

But it wasn’t right. None of it was right. 

“Findekáno,” Tyelkormo said, unease in every fibre of his being, “was the body whole when you found it?”

It should have rotted away. Reports had indicated severe injury, that Maitimo had likely been tortured extensively before dying. But none of those signs were here now. He looked as hale as if he were sleeping, form as beautiful in death as in birth. Mutely, their grief-stricken cousin shook his head. 

A world away on a different plane from this one, Námo said, “now.”

In the very same second, Maitimo’s eyes shot open, and he sat up. Tyelkormo drew his bow. Finekáno stepped back in shock, and Makalaurë, who was tired to his very bones, dropped to his knees and prayed for it to be real.

It was the second prayer of a Noldo answered in as many days. Huan, who knew these things, padded past his master to plant his head in Maitimo’s lap. Tyelkormo, trusting in Huan’s judgement, fell to his knees at his brother’s side and pulled Makalaurë close. Findekáno swayed but remained standing. Tears streaked down his face. Awe-struck by all the world, Maitimo reached out a hand to let Huan sniff him. In return, he received a slobbery tongue across his palm.

“Oh,” he said, and, with no explanation to the rest of them, buried his face in the hound’s wiry fur and wept.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry Maedhros. Sorry readers. I promise my planned updates for the rest of the holidays are a helluva lot less grim.


End file.
